Tag: "Obama administration"

Bill James once noted that the reason for doing research is to avoid paying the price for believing things that aren’t true. The apparently sincere belief of Obama and his political advisers that sending “messages” to the kind of voters Mark Penn makes up cute names to describe is more politically important that the actual state of the economy is a case in point. It’s simply not true, and this belief is not only bad for the country but bad for Obama’s re-election prospects. And this would be the case even if concrete spending cuts were actually popular, which they aren’t.

Many folks on the Twitter seems convinced that the good news about Bin Laden effectively ends the 2012 campaign. This certainly doesn’t hurt. But I would point to George H.W. Bush’s approval ratings in 1991. If unemployment remains high and the recovery remains weak, Obama could absolutely lose in 2012.

…Chait: “The political ramifications: Minimal to nonexistent. The economy will tell the tale in 2012, and Obama — who had been getting relatively little foreign policy flak from the GOP — was not having a problem establishing his credibility as a foreign policy president on the right. Obama can add this to his list of accomplishments, but it’s hard to see it moving voters.” Exactly right.

…the speech on its own terms was extremely effective. What this actually means going forward we’ll see — and obviously wasn’t going to be determined hours after Bin Laden’s death — but it was a powerful moment.

…Irin Cameron had a good question: didn’t the statement that they tried to avoid civilian casualties imply that there were civilian casualties? Initial reports seem to suggest that there were three.

Now it’s getting a little clearer: Obama will throw his support behind the bipartisan effort in the Senate to turn the Simpson-Bowles plan into legislation (sidenote: called it). This will raise as many questions as it answers — if Obama is such a fan of this approach, for instance, why didn’t he say more about it during his budget? — but it is, at base, a more realistic plan both in terms of policy and politics.

It doesn’t of course — Republicans arguing that Gitmo is open because Obama has recognized the wisdom of using the facility is like a bully stealing a kid’s lunch money and then telling everyone he merely decided to make a shrewd investment. Gitmo is open only partially because of administration fecklessness; most of the fault lies with the cowardice of congressional Democrats and the cynicism — and political strength — of Republicans.

Like Glenn, I think this is somewhat too charitable to the administration — it’s true that the actions of Congress made it nearly impossible to close Gitmo per se, but a lot of the underlying problems that Gitmo symbolizes were policy choices made under Obama’s discretion. And while procedural constraints may have improved a little, these improvements are not nearly adequate.

The funniest reaction to the Obama administration’s salutary decision to not defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of DOMA comes, needless to say, from Jeff Goldtsein:

Of course, he doesn’t get to determine that – it was passed by the legislature and signed into law by President Clinton, and so it the duty of the government to defend it — but then, Obama is above the law.

As are all dictators.

We live in a country where the President and his cronies decide what laws to follow and what laws to enforce; what companies are supported and what companies are not; who has to follow comprehensive health care reform and who does not.

Which means we live in a fascist country, ruled by an elected dictator who has positioned himself above and outside the laws he demands we follow — and who has granted himself the right to determine who has to follow what laws, how, when, and why.

That is not freedom. It’s tyranny. Simple as that.

The punchline being that Obama’s predecessor really did believe that he could violate valid acts of Congress and constitutional requirements, and Goldstein was strongly in favor of this. OK, but it’s not exactly news that Goldstein is a buffoon whose views of executive power switch from Carl Schmitt to anti-Federalist depending on the partisan identity of the current occupant of the White House. That still doesn’t make Obama’s actions right if they’re procedurally similar to the Yoovian idea that the laws apply only at the pleasure of the president. As you can see from the comments, many liberals seem to share Col. Mustard’s view that this represents some kind of executive “power grab.” The fact that they’re on the same side as the Duke of Dijon should suggest that their probability of being wrong approaches 100%, and in fact these arguments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going on here:

It’s important, first of all, to emphasize what Obama is not doing — namely, claming to be above the law. He is not claiming that DOMA doesn’t apply, or that the federal courts cannot adjudicate the constitutionality of the act. He is not, in the manner of Jefferson or Jackson, saying that he would ignore a court ruling upholding DOMA. (The Reagan and Bush administrations — as was their right — repeatedly argued that Roe v. Wade should be overruled. The Supreme Court, as you may remember, declined.) He’s merely unwilling to argue on behalf of the law’s constitutionality. There’s nothing about this that is in any way inconsistent with our constitutional framework or the rule of law. The judiciary is not the exclusive interpreter of the Constitution.

But, the argument seems to go, what if because of this precedent allows President Palin to refuse to defend the constitutionality of the mandate? Well, first of all, there’s no precedent being established here. Saint Reagan himself established “tyranny” in the United States at least twice, and if you think that won’t be enough precedent for a future Republican president you must be too distracted by the attempts to put Reagan’s name on every federal institution and face on every unit of federal currency.

But even leaving this aside, if you believe that a Republican president would be bound by past norms you really shouldn’t be permitted to leave the house unaccompanied. To state the obvious, if he wants to President Barbour will refuse to defend the constitutionality of the ACA, and he would still do it if Obama himself defended DOMA before the Supreme Court.

This shouldn’t need to be said either, but the idea that presidents merely mechanically execute laws passed by Congress has never been and never will be how our system works. How the White House interprets and chooses to implement federal law changes substantially depending on who occupies the White House. The occasional refusal to assert that a federal law is constitutional is just one variant of this.

UPDATE: Goldstein continues to assert that Reagan was a fascist. What constitutional or statutory provision requires the DOJ to defend the constitutionality of each and every statute remains unspecified. What constitutional authority gave gave the Bush administration the power to unilaterally replace FISA is also unspecified.

Needless to say, I don’t have much to add to Krugman and Rortybomb. The deal, once you accept that the cave-in on extending the Bush tax cuts was inevitable, was better than expected. But the caveat pretty much swallows the good news. The die on this cast in September, and while I would have preferred that Obama put the better long-term policy of letting all the tax cuts expire above his political self-interest, I’m not naive enough to think there was any chance of this happening. But let’s be clear — this isn’t a “temporary” extension of the Bush upper-class tax cuts. The chance to let them expire has vanished. The political context certainly won’t be better in 2012.